Twelve things they don't tell you about Sydney before immigration

1) Lice infestations are a regular occurence at Sydney schools - they love the moist warm climate, and we've had at least 10 delousing sessions in our home.

2)Australian drivers have never heard of turning right from the middle of the road, so if you want to go left you have to patiently wait even tho' you could have gone five minutes ago if the d-ckheads in front of you would move over 5 cms

3)You may have to take a number and wait in a queue even just to buy a pair of shoes, as happened to us on our last school shoe shopping expedition

4)The police and justice systems can be incredibly petty, punitive, inflexible and myopic, and are often about income generation or power as protecting and serving citizerns. Take one small example: On the 19th of May 2012 we decided to pull our bicycles out of the garage where they had been gathering dust for six months or so. We put on our old bike rack and drove to Centennial Park. Inside we dove along at 15km/h looking for a parking space when a siren went on behind us and we noticed a flashing light. We pulled over and a highway policeman emerged and told us that our bikes were obscuring our license plate and he couldn't read the B and the P at the beginning and end of the plate. He explained that this was a violation and that the plate needed to be on the bikes. I said - truthfully - that we had been using the bike rack for 4 1/2 years (and had driven to parks and campsites all over and outside of Sydney) and had never been stopped or been told this before. He disappeard into his car and emerged a few minutes later with a $353 fine. I was suitably shocked and depressed as was my wife. "Its punitive" I said to him,"if someone had just told us it was not allowed we would have taken apropriate action. Now, out of the blue we suddenly get this huge fine. Can't you just give us a warning?"
"No there's nothing I can do" he reassured us, "the best advice I can give you is to write to the state debt recovery service and see if you can get it changed to a caution." And hedrove off, leaving us to enjoy our Saturday afternoon cycle. And there you have it Ladies and Gentleman - the incorruptable and fearless nature of the boys in blue! 



5) Mainstream Australia is terrified of emotional depth, complexity and ambiguity, so an affirmitive response to a request you make will be closely followed by a declarative "no worries" or "no dramas" - not that anything you said was likely to give rise to worry or drama. When a young Australian is going to send you an email they "just flick it over to you." All is sweetness and light and civility, the repressed and dark angry underbelly generally only emerges when sufficient alcohol has been imbibed, or groups of young men or women find themselves together and the nanny state (in the form of teachers/police etc) is temporarily hidden.

A while back there was an outraged article in an Australian Tabloid about Indian call centre workers who had been told that "Australians dote on their dogs, they're lazy, they love sport, and there's no point in phoning them on a Friday night because they'll all be drunk." No comment.

5)Even tho you have no intention of procreating with the guy at the garage or cash register, he'll still call you mate - and this holds true even if he's only been here a short whil a few days from Iran or Afghanistan or Bangladesh, because everyone wants to be accepted into Australianess (= the Anglo Celtic stereotype thereof)

6) Capitalism and inauthentic relationships based on commodification are more matured here then they are in South Africa, so commercial interactions will often be sealed with a ghastly and synthetic "enjoy your day". That this is generally proffered sincerely is even worse, indicating ho conditioned people are in this society and how alienated from anything that they call deviance and I call living pathlessly (with a nod to Krishnamurti). As for calls to call centres where humans transformed into automatons follow ghastly scripts and you are processed like a sausage by the plodding machinery of corporate idiocy, the synthetic nature of these interactions would be enough to make poets and gurus weep out of compassion for the victims on both end of the line (or signal in these digital days.)

7)Service is non-existent in many large Australian retailers, or incoherent, or unbelievably slow. In general the wheels turn slowly here, except for tax rebates, which ar processed remarkably quickly, so yarmulkes off to the Australian Tax Office for both fleecing and clothing us with remarkable efficiency. In general getting a passport or a mediacare (national health insurance) rebate is incredibly quick and efficient compared to the developing world nightmare of South Africa. But almost everyone in Sydney seems time poor, and most things (commutes, shops, finding parking, public transport, school days, work, finding who to complain to) take an inordinately long time.

8) Sydney housing is amongst the most expensive in the world, and many lower middle class families spend more than 50% of their incom on exorbitant rents or exorbitant mortgages.

9)Australia is one of the most regulated countries in the world and nothing happens here without a plethora of red tape. If you are an entrepreneur, don't expect to make easy money; all the loopholes are plugged, and many many hard working and capable middle class professionals an entrepreneurs struggle to save or to grow their worth.

10) The big four banks here often put up their rates on mortgages even when the Repo rate has not gone up, and what's more, when the repo rate falls the banks Commonwealth, ANZ (infamous for its financing of coal fired power stations) NAB and St George don't pass on the rate cuts to their clients - they care more about their shareholders than their customers, which I guess is how mature capitalism works. (So you 'have' to become a shareholder yourself if you don't want to get too screwed.)

Another strange and blighted thing which emblifies the inflexible in-the box systems based approach here is that if you are self employed it is much more difficult to get a mortgage, and you have to provide a lot of info to get one, even if you can show you have been paying rent consistently for four or five years, rent greater than your proposed mortgage repayments will be.

By contrast if you are formally employed, and can produce 3 or 4 current payslips, its quite easy to get a mortgage, even though you may be retrenched or fired or resign the day after getting the mortgage, and be unable to make the repayments.

More notes on Australia

Immigration To Australia

Year one: busy busy
Year two: zolpidem
Year three: zoloft
Year four: metrol beta blockers
Year five: steroids for haemarhoids and Cymbalata for everything else

_____________________________________

"Can I speak to Alison please?"
"I'm sorry she's not at her desk at the moment"
Ok , could you ask her to phone me please
"Would you like to tell me what its about"
"No I fukking well wouldn't."
_____________________
Because I wanted to get away from Crime and incompetence in SA
I now have to put up with anal bureacrats who hate creativity and spontanaiety with a passion
_____________________

Thank you G?d
for being in Australia
thank you G?d
for bicycles
thank you G?d
for Yoga and rain
thank you G?d
for my so called mistakes

______________

Australia's synagogues
are its shopping malls
horse racing courses
and stadia
where its people try to still
with forgetting and numbness
the hunger for more
but if someone gives me a job
I will stop complaining

_____________________

While I have found some establishment Australian poetry (poetry written in Australia?) fresh and clever, I find much of it to be technically acomplished, but emotinally flat and instantly forgettable - soul less would be the metaphorical descriptor that comes to mind. Which probably says as much about me and my disinterest in recasting myself as Australian (whatever that might be - is Australian an Imam in Lakemba or is it a Tamil Tiger refugee making their way in Adelaide??...answer it is both, as well as the Aboriginal inhabitants and Anglo invaders)

( despite the tokenistic curtsies and nods in the direction of multiculturalism, the public domain here is still dominated and grounded in one discourse, one set of assumptions, one representation of normative reality) which is largely that of secularized English speaking Christianity - so from mainly Anglo TV presenters, to the temporal orientation points of Christmas and Easter, to the normalization of meat eating and heterosexuality and alcohol consumption and horse racing - the ideas about what is Australian still trump who actually lives in Australia, and the visibly or substantially different still live their differences in the safe and subterranean burrows of the private domain )

Message in a bottle

Hello from darkest sydney
where nothing happens very slowly
but perhaps not as slowly as it doesn't happen
in Cairns or September
who knows?
its enough to drive you to Bhuddism or Bretslavism
_____________

Things I l loathe about Australia
its diffident complacency
its bureaucrats and civil srvants trained to think inside (the bottom left hand corner not exceeding 5cm of ) the box

box
its aversion to risk, its do it by numbers
its horse racing beer drinking war on fish tv
its blonde haired presenters, its fear of the depths
its do it by the book robotic pretence

Things I like about Australia
its diffident complacency
its bureaucrats and civil sevants trained to think in the lid of the
box
its aversion to risk, its do it by numbers
its horse racing beer drinking war on fish tv
its blonde haired presenters, its fear of the depths
its do it by the book robotic pretence



Australian history begins in Southern India
Australian history begins in Ireland
Australian history begins in Poland and Greece and Lebanon and South Africa
The narrative does not start here it only continues here
we all bought our lives inside us with us, and tried to continue them here as best we could, in some shape and form, even if we had lost everything there...

See also: australia-day

A message From the NSW Police

"Be alert, confident and assertive."
Sure.
Be 6ft 9 and weigh 160 kilograms.

Australia's War on Fish

Tourists went out to the barrier reef

they watched the fish
they ate the fish
something's got to change:
do one or the other
but not both in the same room

Making the Australian unconscious manifest

There was a police show on tv the other night, a reality based thing, and one story that was followed was 3 immigrant youths who had attacked a homeless man and filmed the attack on their cell phone cameras. The brown skinned, quite diminutive youths seemed to be immigrants from somewhere (Indonesia?/Malaysia/ East Timor ?/ Pacific Islands?) who had, I imagine, grown up in Sydney's West and spoke standard West Sydney working class immigrant English.

White police officer: You should be ashamed of yourselves
(Tranlation: I'm white, and I'm ashamed that the homeless man is also white and a drunkard or mentally ill an unkempt and dysfunctional and seemingly powerless)
Youths look suitably contrite, make noises about how they just did it so that he would leave them alone
(Translation: if we look like this, maybe the powers that be will feel sorry for us, and won't hurt us too much, now that we were stupid enough to get caught and to have filmed ourselves doing it, so we must put on our sorry faces)
Police officer: a vicious and unprovoked assault on a homeless man
(it could have been me, too many of these fukkers coming into the country, they're trash)
Youths: we didn't mean nuffink..just to scare him a bit
etc etc